2025 03 28

Craig, in the studio for a Keep it 100 session at See You Soon. Chicago, Illinois. October, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

My new website is now live! Give it a look, it’s called everyoneisfamous.com.

I’ll likely be spending a bit less time here as I get situated over there, but I won’t quit you, Pointing at Stuff dot com!

-Clayton

2025 03 24

Mal, from a Keep it 100 session at See You Soon. Chicago, Illinois. October, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

Becoming a Portrait Studio
by Clayton Hauck

The following thoughts were written in conjunction with an event happening later this week. Keeping The Lights On: An evening with photographers Clayton Hauck and Jason Little. They will discuss the importance of creative exploration within personal work and projects. You can rsvp for that event here.

Becoming a studio portrait photographer has been a humbling process and far more challenging than I anticipated. While, yes, I’ve been a professional photographer for two decades now, I’ve actively avoided pursuing portrait or headshot clients. Previously, I didn’t have the studio space and for that reason alone it never made much sense. Dedicated space aside, the economics of portrait photography is challenging, especially in today’s market, where everyone is either a photographer themselves or knows a skilled photographer. 

All this said, I became obsessed with a setup artist Jeremy Cowart was offering and sharing via his Instagram. He now calls it The Portrait Lab and has built an entire business around the concept in his hometown of Franklin, Tennessee, outside of Nashville. The methods that caught my attention were his use of a projector to change the background throughout the shoot (he’s now using a fancy LED wall), along with varied lighting schemes which cycle through as you shoot. Basically, I loved the idea of creating a more organic and random situation inside of a controlled studio setting. It would blend a bit of my own candid photographic style into a more traditional portrait approach and I had to try it for myself.

Days of internet sleuthing and rabbit holes eventually led me to the setup I now use (though I prioritize tweaks and trying new things each time I set it up). Jeremy is quite open about his process and has laid much of it out in various industry talks you can find online. For me, the biggest hurdle was not figuring out how to technically do it, but the decision to blatantly steal the idea of another artist. It’s one I still struggle with, while doing everything I can to make the setup my own in the process. For example, he embraced Ai while I shunned it and made Anti-Artificial Intelligence the core focal point of my process.

The name “Keep it 100” came to me while editing photos late one night in the studio. Chicago’s now mayor Brandon Johnson was doing a campaign event, dropped the line in conversation, and it just sort of clicked. I could offer people one-hundred unique photos for one-hundred dollars in one-hundred seconds, all while shunning Ai and providing people with real-life images in a style that is hard to believe isn’t artificial. It would showcase the power that photography can still wield in a world where technological advancements are eroding our standards towards what we believe is real.

THE NEXT BIG THING IN PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY

The first few test shoots I did were so fun that I was completely convinced this thing was going to be huge. In my head, I was envisioning renting spaces to open additional studios while completely customizing the experience to whatever the subjects wanted. Different colors, backdrops, lighting vibes, propping, wardrobe, etc. It would be like a professional wedding photo booth on steroids and there would be lines out the door, I thought! This thing was going to be so big I could pivot my career and open up locations offering these quick and exciting portrait sessions all over the country! Like a photo-obsessed Ray Krok, I was already perfecting the operational flow as guests moved through the setup. 

Then I started offering sessions — for free — to my friends and Instagram followers. That’s when the challenging reality of the situation began to set in. While I’d been thinking this thing would quite literally sell itself and get instantly booked solid whenever I made openings available, the exact opposite thing happened. Nobody cared. It was hard to get people to come by and park themselves in front of my camera, even for the low price of freeeeee! 

Quickly, I learned that convincing people to come to you and give you any amount of money is no easy task, even when you’re offering what you consider to be the world’s best portrait deal. Communicating your ideas are even more important than executing them. That was the takeaway, and it was demoralizing and almost made me give up; it’s what I’m still working on well over a year later.

SALES > SKILLS 

This is the grim reality that artists like myself never want to believe is true. We like to think that good work will rise to the top and get an audience naturally. That people will come flocking to us for our skills alone. That if we only buckle down and focus on producing the best work, everything else will fall into place naturally. At the same time, we love to complain about how so-and-so is terrible and it’s dumbfounding that they got signed by a rep and are working on huge productions all of the time. We focus on the negatives and make excuses that don’t help us in any way. I’m amazed by how often I catch myself remembering that not everyone else already knows and thinks the same things I do.

The portrait setup, for me, was a great refresher in starting out as a photographer — this shit is hard! 

While things started very slow, they did eventually pick up, hardly thanks to my own doing. I stumbled along, offering portrait openings every few months as my schedule allowed, but bookings were light even at my $100 price point. Fortunately, my studio has also allowed me to expand my social network as I’m meeting lots of people through the various events that we host. This is when I learned the value of influencers (another thing we photographers love to scoff at!).

Dennis Lee is a super talented guy (you can find him at Food is Stupid and The Party Cut). He booked a $100 session and loved the results so much that he wrote about it on his popular newsletter, while also telling me I was insane for making it so cheap, which helped me to raise my prices. This was just the bump I needed. Both a social proof-of-concept and a shot of much-needed confidence for myself, the next session found itself a ton more bookings, largely thanks to Dennis, and also because I’d kept at it through the awkward period when things weren’t working out as I thought they were going to.

After the Influencer Bump, I embraced the word-of-mouth method and began to focus on shaping an email list to help promote the offering (something I should have been doing from day one). I woke up one Monday last fall and decided to drop another run of dates the following week. Within hours, I had a dozen bookings already lined up. This was the moment I realized I was on to something with some real potential.

LETS TALK NUMBERS

Earlier I mentioned stealing Jeremy’s idea as being difficult for me. It still is. Another challenge is the super low price point. As a commercial photographer, I’m used to being “too expensive” for clients on a regular basis. We have high standards and we are pretty tough about sticking to them, so me coming out and offering dirt cheap portrait sessions both goes against my own standards and does a disservice to other portrait photographers who make a living doing this work, which is another thing I’m very sensitive to.

So why do I do it?

This answer is complicated and, admittedly, still evolving. My immediate response is that it’s a tough market and the only easy way to get regular bookings is to offer a deal so good that people can’t resist. But this doesn’t justify undercutting your colleagues. My current working justification is that this is a trade. While, yes, I’m giving people wildly affordable portraits (my pricing has since risen to $150, with various add-ons also available to help make it more lucrative for me), I’m also doing it on my own terms. In a sense, these cheap sessions are paid test shoots for me. I’m using whatever backgrounds and lighting schemes I want to try out and learn from, while keeping each session very short (ten minutes or less, usually) so that I can squeeze in a bunch each day. This helps make the math work better without compromising the results — people are still getting an incredible value and the low price point makes me feel good, in a way, that I am providing a “high end” service for an accessible fee. It’s important to me that I’m able to cater towards faces and personalities that otherwise would not show up if I was charging, say, $600 a session (a price that is far more representative of my time and the equipment involved in making all of this happen).

All that said, when my agent tells me I “look desperate” and am ruining my reputation, I don’t fully disagree with her. This industry runs on perception, and the guy doing cheap headshots, or shooting weddings, or events, can’t be trusted to handle a McDonald’s production the following week. Love it or not, that’s how things work. 

Her solution is for me to raise my prices significantly. My solution is to drop them and make the whole thing an art project. My end goal is to make Keep it 100 run as a project that primarily raises money for charity, while working with sponsors and finding other creative solutions to fund it and make money for myself. While the vision is still formulating in my brain (and is very much inspired by another friend and Keep it 100 backer, John Carruthers), and I have a lot of work left to do, it’s this goal which is driving me forward and keeping me most excited about the project.

IN CONCLUSION

Trust me, I hate talking about this stuff. I’d much rather be at the studio shooting new sessions right now and letting things play out organically. But I’m also learning that it’s important, both for marketing purposes (yuck) and my own sanity, to dedicate time towards processing everything and talking about it. Without stopping to digest what you are doing and why it is either working or not working, you risk driving yourself mad in the process or missing potentially simple solutions which allow your idea the space it needs to grow into what you know it has the potential to be.

I’m excited to share the next phase of this endevour, which is largely me getting back to my roots, in the coming days.

-Clayton

Thanks for reading and if you want to hear more about this, the next phase of Keep it 100, and various other personal projects I’ve been working on, stop by my studio this Thursday for the APA Chicago event. Click here to book a session or sign up for the Keep it 100 email alert list and get some fun new photos of your own!

2025 03 06

John aka Crust Fund making another pizza during a fundraiser event at my See You Soon space. Chicago, Illinois. November, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

I’m wildly proud of the things I’ve been able to do at my studio space. That said, I often forget all of the things that have happened here. It’s easy to look at an empty calendar and get sad about how slow or hard things are. Two thoughts on this:

1. Having just completed my taxes (I secretly like doing them because it’s a nice reminder of all the things you did the previous year), I was left impressed by how busy the studio kept me in a year that I’d kind of summed up as being a bad year (business-wise).

2. I’m (forcing myself to) finally get a regular newsletter going. We’ll start with the studio, which should go out every month, and eventually (soon) I’ll get one going for my own “personal brand” which will be focused solely on my photography work. I’ve long shunned this habit because: it’s boring and I don’t want to do it; they just get trashed and hardly anyone sees them; I dislike talking about myself (contrary to what this blog may lead you to believe!). That said, it finally hit me that there’s just as much benefit to my own personal mental health in the practice as there is potential benefits from a marketing perspective, and that’s huge!

Set aside some time to look back and reflect on all the amazing things you’ve accomplished and it will likely help bring a smile to your face.

Then, if you don’t tell anyone about all the cool things you’ve done, did they actually happen?

-Clayton

PS- sign up for the newsletter why don’t you?!

2025 03 01

Yoder and some fine wine. Chicago, Illinois. November, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

We’re doin’ movie night at the studio tonight, which I’ve dubbed Cinema 606 (shoutout Katie!), and I’m very excited about it. I’m on cocktail duty, as always, and Allison is making her amazing tavern pizzas (shoutout John!) and some other tasty stuff. It’s amazing having the space to do stuff like this, and I have no shortage of ideas on other things to do both inside and outside the space…but of course, time. Time is always the constraint. So much so that I find myself overwhelmed with thoughts and ideas to the point that I end up stalling and getting nowhere.

I used a photo of Kenneth today because he’s someone who suffers from the same condition. We should probably start a podcast about it. That’s the answer!

-Clayton

2025 02 20

The Kickback play an acoustic set at See You Soon. Chicago, Illinois. December, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

In doing a lot of “research” towards shooting motion, I’ve also been watching and discovering a ton of youtube channels. There’s a lot of great stuff out there, which is both inspiring and concerning (from a business mindset)! This lil gem from Mandelbro below popped into my feed and was a much needed breath of fresh air on a day like today where the world sure does feel as though it is falling apart.

He touches on the idea in the video, but my decision to open a photo studio three odd years ago remains one on of my favorites yet. While it’s been an insane amount of work, wildly challenging, and realistically far too expensive to justify, the new connections and life paths it has opened up for me have me it all worthwhile. Here’s hoping this year’s pivot to video will provide some similar gains, as I know the time, energy, and money required is going to be daunting.

-Clayton

2025 02 10

How ‘bout them boys? The Bobcat Boys. See You Soon. Chicago, Illinois. October, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

Recently I had a creative breakthrough that is really carrying me lately.

M U S I C

I know, I know. It’s not a very profound realization, however, I kinda forgot how much music has driven my creative impulses over the years. I got into a-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l of this largely because of music… shooting video and editing it to music. Making photos of nights revolving around music. Music drove everything!

I’m fortunate that I’ve found my own creative voice over the years but lately very much feel like I’m at a crossroads of sorts, both for personal and environmental reasons. Music has both helped keep me on course and inspired me to explore new paths. This year will surely be a defining one for me in a number of ways, but I’m fortunate to have rediscovered my love of music to help me navigate it.

-Clayton

2025 02 09

Dave, game day ready. Chicago, Illinois. September, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

Enjoy the big game, the big cheese, the big event, the big night, the big show, the big meal, the big bevvies, the big cahuna.

I wonder if, now that America is deciding it doesn’t want to run the world or police the world, we’ll become more modest in our sporting-event habits?

There is only so much money you can juice from the public before there is no more juice to squeeze, after all.

Anyway — Go team! I’m just here for the nachos.

-Clayton

2025 02 05

Madeline. See You Soon, Chicago, Illinois. November, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

Here’s a portrait from my Keep it 100 portrait setup, which I am offering all this week at my See You Soon studio. Sign up for a session and get some photos made of yourself, why don’t you? Just this week, I’ve started incorporating short interviews along with each subject who wishes to participate. I will eventually package them into blog form, I just need to figure out where that blog will live (its own website, here, or within the studio website, more likely).

This image was made with my new petzval lens, which I bough specifically for exploring within this setup (downside is no autofocus).

-Clayton

2025 01 31

New year, new growth. Let’s check in. See You Soon, Chicago, Illinois. October, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

We’re a month in and I woke up inspired to write a post going through my various focuses for this year to check in and see if there’s been noticeable progress. Surely this will be more useful for myself, however, I do think others may take some value from my perspective, so figured I would share it publicly.

Recap of the topics to cover, with more thinking behind each of them, are:

1. The Illinois Project aka Ill Wandering

2. Documentary Project

3. Photobook Store

4. Commercial Food & Beverage Photography

5. Portrait Studio

6. Opening a Bar

7. This Here Blog

8. Street Photography

9. The Studio As An Event Space

One month is not a very long time, but I think it’s interesting to see which areas I’ve decided to dedicate my time to. I’m very much a go-with-the-flow, listen to the universe kinda guy, so things may be vastly different come summer time.

One. The Illinois Project aka focusing more on a big personal photography project. Some personal work has happened, however, we’ll discuss that more when we get to Number Eight. The Illinois Project is still very much alive in my brain, but it is also dawning on me how big of an idea this is, which realistically will take me many years to get to a place where I have something meaningful. I’m still very motivated to pursue this idea this year and recently attended a webinar through Filter with photographer/author Tim Carpenter which helped focus my brain a bit more towards ways of making this idea a reality. Finding the time has been challenging this month.

Two. Documentary Project. This is one that I have completely sidelined this month. That said, my partners in the project have been busy on other projects so nobody had been pushing things forward. This changed yesterday and it now sounds like we’ll get moving on this project, full steam ahead, next week. My participation will likely change slightly as well, but the takeaway for me is that I had unrealistic expectations of myself and they needed to change. Amazing footage is worthless if it only exists in your head. We need to get moving if this project is going to become something, and we are doing that next week. I still don’t have all my video shit figured out, still need a camera, still need to plan and learn, but really I don’t need any of these things. I only need to do.

Realistically, this might be the area I spend the most time on this year (along with shooting video for myself) but I will also need to heavily lean on others to make it happen. This documentary is kind of an analogy and exploration of this artistic struggle I am currently experiencing and writing about here, so it feels very prescient in many ways.

Three. Photobook Store. The only progress made was running into a friend while out wandering the streets who has also been thinking about this idea. We will connect next week and see if it can go somewhere beyond our brains. I continue to think this idea is a great one, while also understanding this idea will require a lot of time. The only realistic way for me to make it a reality is to partner with others (the big theme this year!). Beyond the photobook shop, I have even grander dreams and visions which, depending on how things play out, may also be explored. Time will tell.

Four. Commercial Food & Beverage Photography. Zero progress has been made here beyond editing a large food project we shot late last year. This editing process has confirmed my belief that it is a good idea to pursue, I’m just worried it might not be the one that lights a fire under my ass. It feels like the safe bet (which scares me because commercial photography, generally, is far from a safe bet). Back burner.

Five. Portrait Studio. Come by and shoot with me next week! I’ve got the setup going Feb 3-11 and this continues to excite me while also understanding this venture is both wildly time consuming and challenging to make a bunch of money at. It’s sort of a creative outlet side project, but also I have some fun ideas I am exploring that might turn it into a larger thing. I still love the idea of taking the setup on the road sometime this year. Pittsburgh, maybe? Anyone need some fun portraits in Pittsburgh? Hit me up!

There was also a lot of time spent on the idea of expanding the studio to better accommodate portraits but we’ll get into that in the last section.

Six. Opening a Bar. I mentioned going with the flow and the flow very much pushed me towards opening a bar this month. Remarkably, a nearby bar went up for sale and, along with a friend, we seriously explored buying it and running it ourselves. The place was named after a photographer (it’s Weegees for any locals paying attention), does great cocktails, has a great classic vibe, outdoor patio, and is walking distance from my home and studio. It made sense in so many ways and felt like fate was taking a hold of my life. But it did not work out. It did, however, open a can of worms which had my brain bouncing around to all sorts of places, the through line of which was that they were not photography. Consideration of a big career shift. The struggle is real, the times are tough, the trends bad, and I’m not so sure the course is correctable this time. This will be an ongoing struggle all year, I’m sure but let’s leave it at that for now.

Seven. This here blog. Yes! I am continuing it but will not be writing as much or as often as I had been previously (or am today, yikes!). I do still love it here and want to keep the thing going, but will lean on simple single-image posts much of the time. I’m also itching to attempt some more narrative fiction writing when I have downtime and may begin to post that here as well. Apologies in advance!

Eight. Street photography. I got ambitious and made an elaborate creative resolution that I would get my ass out of the house once a week and “do something creative for myself.” At the core of that idea is wandering and making street photos. I got off to a nice start and put a half day into shooting, posting to IG, and felt good about it all. Since then, I’ve only gone out once more and ended up doing far more socializing (and drinking) than photo taking. The key to keeping this going, I think, will be to allow myself grace and not make it such a rigid process. There are a hundred ideas floating around in my head and, as always, finding the time to work on them will be the limiting factor and doesn’t make me a failure if I don’t get to them as much as I’d like.

Nine. Studio as an event space… this has been an interesting subject. I spent far too much time dreaming and scheming this month and most of it was relating to buying the bar (that we failed to do. See: Six) or expanding my existing See You Soon studio (which I’ve likely also failed to do). Oftentimes I get these grand visions that just feel right and make so much sense in my head. At the core of this idea is diversification and the big theme for the year: partnering with others. I know I need to lean on others to accomplish any of the big ideas I’d love to accomplish. Running the studio is no exception. Having a larger space, while more expensive (scary!) offers more flexibility and capacity for more people. The problem I’m finding is that nobody wants to take risks right now. Nobody wants to spend money. And this instinct is probably not wrong!

In the end, I can’t continue to be the one putting all the pressure on myself alone. I’m trying to find others to help carry the load but so far I’m not having much success. We’ve got something good going here and I hope to continue it. Luckily the year is young.

Have a great weekend! If you read some (or all!?) of this post, I appreciate you and I hope you took something worthwhile from it. If not, well, I suggest checking out social media — it’s full of cheap thrills!

-Clayton

2025 01 27

Sixteen of my limited edition prints. See You Soon. Chicago, Illinois. November, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

I’ve been printing a ton lately! Above are sixteen of my own images that I am offering for sale, reasonably-priced, to anyone looking to add a little joy to their walls. You can check out the whole series and place an order if so inclined here! These prints were all made by myself, using high quality paper and archival ink, in my secret print shop at the studio, for a show that just wrapped up in the lobby of my studio’s building (the Kimball Arts Center). While I have been printing a lot, I haven’t been selling nearly as much. It’s a goal this year to get better about selling (or giving away!) what I print before continuing to stockpile what I’ve already made. Everything is a process. One step at a time.

I’m also currently working on a large print order (not my images) which paid enough for me to buy a bunch of new paper that I plan to use making zines and more postcards. None of this is really making me money (yet?), but it’s been a fun new hobby and I can see myself doing lots more printing in the coming years, perhaps even making it more of a focus of my photography practice in one way or another (no shortage of ideas!).

So yeah, if you’re a local photographer looking to print some of your work, reach out! Or, check out the website I put together to sell my own prints and pass me your email to be entered to win a free future print drop. I’d love to keep releasing new images but I need to discontinue or sell out a few of the previous releases first!

-Clayton

2025 01 14

David Dondero was playing at my house, my house. Chicago, Illinois. September, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

Becoming an Event Space Owner in 2025

If you’ve been to my studio space, dubbed See You Soon, you’ve seen the stylish kitchen, bar, fancy office partitions, and disco bathroom. It’s a dream urban loft space, and I often tell people I live there… I just don’t sleep there. I’m there a lot. The decision to open a studio space in the waning days of Covid lockdowns is one that was life changing for myself in many ways. Looking back, it was a time of excitement and optimism! The world was reopening; my commercial photography business was thriving; and I was betting on myself in a big way. It just made a lot of sense.

The room felt so good to me that I also decided to invest a huge amount of my own money into shaping the space into something I would be proud of, in the hopes of turning it into a more public-facing business not only open to photo and video production but also dinners, events, and gatherings of all shapes and forms.

Soon after opening, we had the exciting new mayoral candidate host a campaign event in our space and it was jam packed full of people, including multiple Congresswomen and a half dozen Alderpersons. Things were looking up! Things were exciting!

Then reality struck.

It’s been about three years now since we’ve been paying rent on the studio space, and I can easily say it’s been the most challenging endeavor of my life. Almost immediately after opening, work slowed to a halt and our industry hit a downturn which still hasn’t quite managed to correct itself (and feels like it may never do so for a number of reasons we won’t get into now). On top of that, our newly-renovated building was reassessed by the city and our tax payments more than doubled, increasing our rent by far more than we had anticipated. Then, the few studio bookings we did manage to get each seemed to have disaster strike (broken elevator, mouse infestation, parking lot problems, etc), likely turning people off from renting our space again in the future. More problems occurred, such as a deteriorating wall that needed extensive repairs, and now there’s a growing homeless encampment directly out the windows with an otherwise beautiful view of The 606.

It quickly became clear to me that making the space work as a photo studio alone would be impossible and I needed to focus quite a lot more on opening up the space for other uses. 

Since opening, we’ve done a huge amount of events that I’ve been proud of. Last week, we hosted the Chicago Bulls. Last year, I got married in the space! We’ve done multiple holiday markets featuring dozens of super talented artists and makers, art shows and artist talks, dozens of dinner events full of amazingly talented people, and even some live music including an all-time favorite artist of mine, David Dondero. I have no shortage of ideas on things we can host and organize, and it’s been that spark of reconnecting with something I previously loved to do which has been super fulfilling. The creative juices are flowing. Bringing people together in real life has been a breath of fresh air for me. I’ve found that even while going through the most challenging phase of my career — I’ve been the most happy. Less social media and more in-person socializing. Do I need an expensive studio space in order to make that happen? No, but it’s been very motivating for me in many ways and the new connections I’ve made as a result are worth so much to me.

In December, the studio had an ambitious schedule that was tough for me to navigate. In part, it’s a sign that I’m on the right track and it has me hopeful to be in a more sustainable place financially this year. But also, it made me realize that I either need to scale back my personal ambitious for the space or find a more sustainable path forward, specifically, involving other people. This is perhaps my strongest conviction this year — in order to make my dreams become a reality, I will need to partner with, trust, and lean on others.

During an event one night last month while the studio was packed full of people, I had a wave of happiness wash over me, thinking that I was helping provide culture to the city. I put myself in the shoes of my own self twenty years ago and imagined how cool it would’ve been to go to the place I now call my own. I want to build on this feeling and continue to shape the place into something that gives back in whatever small ways it is able to and provides a space for people to explore their own curiosities. Of course, all these dreams and ideas require time, which takes away from other creative projects I hope to focus on. As always, t’s a tradeoff, but one I think is worth serious consideration. I imagine a life in which my sole job is to plan and host various events and it sounds quite fulfilling and exciting, even when factoring in the constant floor mopping required.

All that said, if you’ve got a fun idea but need a space to make it happen, don’t hesitate to reach out. Let’s talk. Let’s make some magic happen this year! The world is crazy enough and the distraction is good.

-Clayton

This is one entry in a multi-part series of self-exploration and contemplation-out-loud in advance of the new calendar year. Some of this may happen; none of this may happen.
For the complete list of posts, see 2024 12 25.